BREAKING NEWS: Dates set for 2015 Biggest Week!

Mark your calendars NOW for May 8 - 17, 2015!

The sun has set on another spectacular Biggest Week In American Birding and we are exhausted but elated! We all agree that this was the finest year yet, and what we love the most is that the connections and friendships made through this festival are life-changing. Here in NW Ohio, we live at the crossroads of birds and people and it is a truly magical place to be! It's the most extraordinary thing to be part of, and we owe a debt of gratitude to a long-long-long list of individuals, organizations, agencies, and companies for giving so much to make this event possible.

To all those who helped in any way, shape, or form, please know that you are loved and appreciated. We offer special thanks and praise to Field Trip Coordinator Rob Ripma, Presentation and Workshop Coordinator Katie Andersen, Blog Team Coordinator Kim Smith, and heaps and heaps of praise and gratitude to Delores Cole, the organizational genius who can make a spreadsheet seem like a beautiful thing!

Enormous praise and thanks to the outstanding guides from our tour company partners! Please visit their websites (links from their logos, below), and travel around the world with these fine people. It'll change your life! Thank you to our many sponsors, including Birds & Blooms Magazine, Kaufman Field Guides, American Bird Conservancy, Vanguard Birding US, Eagle Optics, Time & Optics, and Celestron. And special thanks to our Kirtland's Warbler sponsor, Carl Zeiss Birding!

Thank you to our fabulous speakers, field trip leaders, and bus drivers! Much praise and thanks to our partners at The Press and The Beacon for helping us create another wonderful Biggest Week Visitors' Guide, and to Scott Arvin for designing another sensational cover! And truckloads of thanks to Patrick Czarny and his staff at Maumee Bay Lodge and Conference Center who make tons of hard work seem like fun!

If praise and gratitude could build a mountain, we'd climb to a peak so high you could scarcely imagine it and shout our deepest heartfelt thanks to the most aMAYzing team of volunteers in the universe. In our hearts, we think of the festival as the Biggest Week In American Teamwork, and we love these people like family. Without this team of more than 250 volunteers from all over the country, the Biggest Week would not be possible.

To all of the people who joined us to celebrate birds during the most extraordinary ten days in Birding Nirvana, thanks for helping to make this year's Biggest Week In American Birding all that we ever dreamed it could be.

And finally, thank you to the birds for bringing us all together in celebration of the joy, the beauty, and the wonders of the natural world.